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storm surfers

This morning the Storm Surfers team is intercepting a swell 75 kilometres off the coast of Western Australia. The wave they'll be surfing has never been ridden before and lies just inside the continental shelf.

We'll hopefully have photos of that expedition soon, but for now here is a previous Storm Surfer mission, this one on the opposite side of the continent to a relatively well-known bommie off the NSW coast.

On Sunday, with 6-8 foot of south-east swell lighting up the Sydney coast, the Storm Surfers team rolled into the Cape Solander carpark. The two leading surfers, Tom Carroll and Ross Clarke-Jones, have recently taken Maroubra surfer, Mark Matthews, under their wing. At the Cape however, the roles were clearly reversed - Matthews giving the other two a lesson in shallow-water tuberiding

Former two-time world champion Tom Carroll and his tow-surfing partner, Ross Clarke-Jones, narrowly escaped serious injury whilst surfing in Western Australia last week.
In the middle of filming a sequence for the upcoming movie, Storm Surfers 3D, Carroll towed Clarke-Jones into a mid-size wave on his jet ski, only to be caught by the wave as he headed for the channel.
According to Carroll, "The waves were so wild and unpredictable that is was hard to tell what was happening. I tried to manhandle the ski but the wave just took me where it wanted."
Unfortunately, the wave completely engulfed Tom and destroyed the ski in the process - ripping large stainless steel mounts away from the ski's frame, and pulverising a $15,000 carbon-fiber 3D camera rig.

With the final screws on the camera rigs tightened last week the Southern Ocean came to life, allowing us to start shooting for the new project. Last weekend Ross, Tom and I - plus a fifteen-strong technical crew - headed south to Tasmania to capture Shipsterns in full flight.

Mark Matthews has been pushing the limits of surf photography. Matthews, who was one of the first surfers to utilise GoPro cameras to film his own waves, has built a camera stand to house his GoPro camera. Working in conjunction with Sportscamera, Matthews has fitted the stand to his surfboard and the experimenting has begun.